Mindspeak (22 page)

Jack leaned his head into the crook
of my neck. I felt his warm breath against my skin. My body tensed, and then he
whispered, “I meant what I said. I won’t let you fall.” I don’t think he meant it
in the physical sense. He lifted a hand and pulled my hair away from my face. “And
I won’t allow anyone to hurt you.” His voice sounded weird, hoarse.

I closed my eyes, concentrating on
the warmth of his body close to mine. “I think I know that.” I reopened my eyes
and turned my head so that I could see him. The features of his face softened
when our eyes met.

He ran his thumb along my
cheekbone. I leaned into his touch. I wanted to freeze this moment, to forget
about the secrets kept from me my whole life. I wanted only to remember that
last night, for a short time, I was a normal teenager out on a date. In this
dream scenario, on top of this giant animal, I wanted to pretend that Jack was
mine. That we were just out for a romantic ride through the woods.

“You are so beautiful,” he said. He
leaned closer, kissed my lips. “And I
am
yours.”

My body tensed. His fingers tickled
the skin around my face and lingered along my neck as his words confirmed that
my mind wasn’t safe.

“Have you always been able to hear
my thoughts?”
Because I haven’t always thought the nicest things
.

He smiled and nodded. “Most of
them.”

I cringed. “Do you hear other
peoples’ thoughts? Other girls’?”

Jack laughed. “No.”

I faced forward while touching the
dry skin beneath my nose. “My nose doesn’t bleed when I direct thoughts at you?”
Maybe because they’re actually my private thoughts that come naturally
.

“Probably.”

“Which is completely, one-hundred
percent scary. I’m not sure I can control those thoughts.”

“You don’t have to. You don’t need
to be afraid of me, Lexi. But—”

Tell that to the circus
elephants in my stomach.

He chuckled softly. “I will teach
you control.”

“Control?”

“Your thoughts. I can teach you to
keep your thoughts from me. To allow me to hear only the thoughts you want me
to hear.”

That’s a relief.

“And your other… abilities. You’ll
learn to control those as well.”

“I don’t have other abilities.”

“You just haven’t discovered them
yet.”

~~~~

A strong storm blew in that afternoon.
Horizontal rain pelted the windows along the back of the house, including those
in Dr. DeWeese’s study.

Jack led me to the sofa and
gestured for me to sit. No words had passed between us since we left the barn,
but if I was able to read his face and he my thoughts, I knew one thing for
sure—we were both scared.

“Where are your parents?”

“Traveling.” He continued over to
his father’s desk where he sat and unlocked a desk drawer.

“Traveling where?” Was he purposely
being vague? What happened to no secrets?

“Sicily.” A dark look passed over
his face.

“That’s where my father was living.
They’re searching for the journals,” I said, somewhat betrayed.

Thunder clapped and lightning
flashed in dramatic bursts, lighting up the room. I flinched.

Jack pulled out a black box from a
bottom drawer and placed it in front of him. He opened it carefully, dug
through the contents and pulled an item out before closing the box again.

The lighting in the office was dim.
He crossed the room and sat beside me.

“This… is Sandra.” He handed me a photograph.

Tearing my eyes from his, I looked
down at the woman in the picture. I reached a shaky hand and traced the outline
of the woman’s face, her smile, the curves of her body. Jack’s expression was
as serious as I had ever seen it. “Sandra?”

He nodded.

Short and slender, she stood
between Dad and Dr. DeWeese. The two men had an arm around her. She grabbed at
her long brown hair blowing in a breeze. All three smiled. They were laughing.
Sandra’s green eyes stared straight at the camera.

I didn’t understand. “It’s me.” A
voice in my head screamed,
This is a picture of me. I look exactly like her.
She looks like me
.

Jack winced as if I had actually
yelled.

Sandra stood at the same height as
me, coming to just under Dad’s chin. Her eyebrows curved the same way mine did
when she smiled. Her nose was slightly crooked. I traced the straight line of
mine—the only visible difference. “I don’t believe it.” Jack remained a statue beside
me. “What does this mean?” My eyes returned to the photograph—a picture worth
way more than a thousand words.

Some of them not nice words.

“So… what?” I asked, searching his
eyes for answers he wasn’t being terribly forthcoming with. Except I didn’t
need them; I knew. Maybe I had always known. It was easy to ignore all the
signs, tucked away in a boarding school. Different name. A father who lived in some
Mediterranean country doing who-knows-what with embryonic stem cells. A mother
who fled shortly after I was born. I wasn’t really hers. “I was cloned?” Tears
welled against the edge of my bottom eyelid.
I’m Frankenstein’s monster.

“No.” Jack sandwiched my face with
his hands. His palms hot against my cheeks. “No! You are not a monster. We… are
not monsters.”

We?
I looked back at the
picture. John DeWeese. With hair.
He is you
. A slightly older Jack, but
not by much. Dr. DeWeese in his late-twenties, early-thirties.

“How long have you known?” My voice
cracked.

“About being cloned from my father?
A while.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He cocked his head. “How do you tell
a seventeen-year-old girl that you care for deeply and who strongly opposes how
our fathers played with human life that, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a clone of my own
father?’”

“How long have you known I was
cloned from Sandra?”

“I suspected the day you overheard
my parents arguing about Sandra.”

“You heard my thoughts. That day in
the kitchen when you spilled your orange juice.”

He nodded.

“How long have you known I was
cloned?”

“I only confirmed you were like me,
genetically manipulated in some way, the day I heard your first thought. But
cloned? Not very long.”

“But you didn’t tell me at first.”
I couldn’t hide the hurt.

“Again, how was I going to tell a
girl searching for her own unique identity that she is the result of a genetic
experiment? I hoped your father would tell you. And fill in some of the blanks.”

I sucked in a breath.

“And I believe he was coming to do
exactly that.” Jack squeezed my hand.

I pulled my hand away, stood and
marched over to the window. Rain pummeled the glass. Lightning strobed. I wrapped
my arms around my waist, and my body shook. Like the droplets of water
streaming down the windowpanes, tears poured down my cheeks.

I’d known what my father was
capable of all of my life. He claimed that the technology for cloning humans
was out there. I’d always assumed that “out there” meant scientists were
capable, but would never resort to such monstrosities.

I sensed Jack’s presence right
behind me before I felt his hands on my arms.

I whipped around and backed up from
him.

“Lexi…” He wrinkled his brows.

“I feel betrayed,” I whispered.

“I know. Please don’t hate me. I
couldn’t stand it if you hated me.”

You? I don’t hate you. You didn’t
do this.

He moved a strand of hair off my
forehead and tucked it behind my ear. He leaned in and kissed my forehead.

My knees buckled. Jack caught me in
his arms and lowered me gently to the floor. He sat in front of me, pulled me
into his lap, and rocked. I succumbed to numb shock.

Chapter
Nineteen

A residual clap of thunder shook the
house. It had been thunderstorm after thunderstorm all afternoon. The
electricity flickered a few times before it went out completely. My nerves were
shot.

Tucked into the corner of the
DeWeese’s living room sofa, I drew my knees in and hugged them. My body
trembled—I wasn’t sure if it was from the slight chill in the air, the loud
severe storms that caused the house to be dark and without a security system,
or the worried look Jack wore.

He stoked the fire. I eyed his
every move. Studied his facial expressions. His command of the house. His
maturity. His actions were not that of a high-school senior, yet the smooth
skin around his eyes screamed youth.

Finally, he sunk down onto the
opposite side of the couch and faced me.

“You thought I would run when I learned
the truth of where I came from,” I said. Running would be the easy way. Right then,
running did have its appeal. But someone had killed my father and tried to kill
me. I had to know who.

A shadow crossed his eyes. “I wish
telling you that you were a clone was why I thought you would run.”

I stared at him. My eyelids felt slightly
swollen.

“I don’t want to tell you any of
it, though. Not now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I planned to. When I discovered
that the daughter of the famous Dr. Peter Roslin was at Wellington. I planned
to tell you everything I knew. Mom forbade me from going to Wellington. But I
was already eighteen. I told her I’d run if she tried to stop me.”

“What stopped you from telling me?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m
so thankful I already know how to control the thoughts you can hear from me.”
His lips lifted in an uneasy smile.

I relaxed the hold I had on my
knees and moved closer to him, stopping in the middle of the couch to keep from
touching him. I was not going to touch him. It was bad enough he could hear
most of my thoughts. “I thought you said ‘no more secrets’.”

He sighed, the muscles around his
eyes tight. “I did say that.” He placed both hands on his knees. His fingers
spread wide. “Okay. Here it goes.”

He stood and walked over to the
fire, placing his palms against the mantle above it. Again, his nervousness
struck me as odd. He was holding something back. Information that might send me
running, according to him. He seemed… what? Afraid?

“Who would have thought this would be
the toughest part to tell you.”

“Right now, Jack, I’m so freaked.
Start with anything.” I stood and wrung my hands. The muscles in my shoulder
ached; my entire body was sore from the previous night’s car crash. I rubbed my
temples while I waited for him to speak.

He faced me. “I wanted to heal your
injuries completely last night. But I didn’t want to be too sick to protect you
from whoever came at us if they struck again. And I didn’t want to be too sick
to answer your questions about Seth. The thought of you leaving me and not looking
back…” He took a few steps forward. “I can make the headache go away.” He ran
his fingers lightly across my forehead and over my eyelids, where the pain was
the strongest.

I grabbed both his hands with mine
and lowered them, holding them between us. “You’re changing the subject. Just
tell me.”

Okay, here it goes
. “You
were created for me. To complement my abilities. And vice versa.”

An involuntary gasp escaped through
my lips. I dropped his hands. “Come again.”

“Sandra was crazy obsessed with
cloning humans and enhancing the brain’s genetic makeup. So, first, she created
human embryos—one from my father’s DNA and then one from her own.”

I swayed slightly.

“Come. Sit down.” Jack grabbed my
hand and led me back to the sofa.

When I found the courage, I lifted
my eyes and met his. The wind and the rain calmed outside. Any trace of
sunlight was MIA and the house was dark. The light from the fire and the
candles produced a soft glow on his face, but his eyes carried the storms of the
day.

“You said Sandra was a geneticist.”

“And a neurologist. They say she was
fascinated with the human mind and how doctors might battle injuries and
diseases of the brain in the future.”

I peered into Jack’s eyes. There
was more. So much more. I could almost see the inner workings of his own brain
twisting and turning each piece of this puzzle—our lives. Did he start with the
straight edges, the easier stuff and the foundation for the rest of the
hard-to-fit pieces? Or did he just jump into the middle and piece it all
together for me from the inside out?

Did he even have all the pieces?

“Let me get this straight. Sandra
cloned your father and then herself. Your father agreed to this?”

“Yes and no.” Jack held my hand and
absentmindedly drew circles on my palm. “Father agreed to test Sandra’s claim
that she could clone an adult human and enhance the genetic makeup of the brain
without compromising the embryo.”

“And?”

“According to my father, the
embryos were never supposed to become more than that. They were supposed to be
destroyed and never implanted. They were never supposed to become human babies.”

“But they did. Become human babies.
The embryos became you and me.”
She created two freaks
.

Jack’s expression darkened. He
reached his other hand and lifted my chin. “Stop it with the freak talk. I am
no freak, and you, my dear, are most certainly no freak.”

“Why are you telling me all this
now? Why not tell me when you fixed my arm? Or when I asked you if we were
designer babies.” That thought made want to laugh. As if my parents had wished
for me to have green eyes and strong arms and legs for swimming. “Or when my
dad was killed? Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I hoped your dad would tell you
initially. And then…”

“…he died,” I finished for him.

“And I’m only now putting a lot of
this together. I knew about myself, but I just started asking more questions
about you and your abilities recently.”